Jimmy Breslin, the newspaper reporter and columnist who interviewed John F. Kennedy‘s gravedigger, popularized characters like Fat Thomas and Marvin the Torch and received correspondence from the Son of Sam, was the subject of a long roster of praise, anecdotes and remembrances — not all of them flattering — on Monday night.

Mr. Breslin, who is around 80 (he isn’t sure of his precise age), was feted by past colleagues from The Daily News and Newsday (several of whom now work at The New York Times) for nearly two and a half hours in a celebration organized by New York University‘s Glucksman Ireland House. (“Only at N.Y.U. could you have the Glucksman institute for Irish studies,” quipped Sam Roberts, a reporter for The Times.) The event was capped by an impromptu appearance by Tony Bennett, which seemed to take Mr. Breslin by surprise.

Dan Creighton/New York UniversityMr. Breslin, 79, won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1986.

The event would almost have seemed like a memorial service, but for the fact that Mr. Breslin — who stepped onto the stage at the university’s Kimmel Center after the dozen or so speakers had taken their seats — looked on from an armchair at stage left. Wearing a gray suit, blue shirt and purplish-red tie, he looked amused or incredulous. It was hard to tell which.

Pete Hamill, the journalist and writer who is himself an heir to the tradition of hard-drinking Irish-American newspaper veterans, was the master of ceremonies, and said the event was a celebration of journalism, Irish-Americans and New York. He ticked off the details of Mr. Breslin’s early life: his birth during the Depression and at the advent of the radio era, his family’s admiration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, his mediocre trumpet playing and his starting his career as a copy editor at The Long Island Press.

Mr. Breslin first worked at The New York Journal-American and then at The New York Herald Tribune, where his columnist’s voice emerged. “We who worked in newspapers at the time knew that something fresh and new had happened to the city,” Mr. Hamill recalled. He added: “Jimmy took some of the craft of sportswriting and applied it to the people who actually lived in the city, one at a time. And he used that technique to bring to life a city that had never been fully covered for a long time.”

Mr. Hamill continued: “He wrote a column, therefore he was entitled to opinion. But the opinion was based on reporting. When he did express it, he had a knack for not saying it, and letting the reader say it – which was based, again, on the reporting.”

Having grown up in hardship, Mr. Breslin had the common touch, Mr. Hamill said: “People didn’t have to explain what it meant to be poor in the richest city in the world. He knew. It was in his DNA.”

Gail Collins, an Op-Ed columnist and former editorial page editor of The Times, quoted Murray Kempton, the Newsday columnist who died in 1997, describing Mr. Breslin as “the best columnist I’ve ever read.” She also recalled witnessing a heated argument between Mr. Breslin and an editor, Sharon Rosenhause.

“I have never heard so much yelling,” Ms. Collins said, calling it the closest to “armed combat” she’d ever experienced. After Mr. Breslin won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1986, Ms. Collins recalled, “He said, ‘This award actually belongs to Sharon Rosenhause, but I’m not speaking to her.’ And at that moment he won my heart — and he has it to this very day.”

Michael J. O’Neill, a former editor of The News, recalled that Mr. Breslin’s expense accounts were “a shambles” but called the columnist “the paper’s star attraction, regularly leading reader reports, surveys, topping even heavy-hitters like Ann Landers, and helping his employers sell a lot of newspapers.”

Mr. O’Neill said that over Mr. Breslin’s career, newspapers witnessed changes in the socioeconomig background of journalists. “He was in fact a valid link to the historic working-class base of The Daily News,” Mr. O’Neill said. “Many of the new-generation reporters coming aboard in the 1970s and 1980s were not so well-endowed: all highly educated and all highly professional. But they didn’t live in Red Hook or Hunts Point. They didn’t want to live in East New York or be assigned to Harlem.”

Mr. O’Neill added: “The disconnect between newspapers and ordinary people was a bad omen for the industry and underlined as nothing else could the priceless value of Jimmy Breslin, who grew up in Queens on the ground floor of the city with a mother who was working for the Welfare Department and had an intense hatred of unfairness.”

Mary Ann Giordano, now a deputy metropolitan editor at The Times, recalled asking repeatedly as a cub reporter, “How would Breslin cover it?” The untold angle, “the little guy who unwittingly was drawn into some bit of breaking news, the detail that will never come out by a press conference or a telephone interview” — all were trademarks of Mr. Breslin’s work, she said.

Michael Daly, a columnist for The News, recalled that Mr. Breslin — who does not drive — took a taxicab to the riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991. The taxi was set on fire and Mr. Breslin was attacked and beaten. “He had a very scary moment with that cab – that was no joke – and the thing about J.B. is, he went right to work and it did not change for one bit the way he wrote about the people of this city, who he did not think were being treated fairly,” Mr. Daly said. “He stayed true to himself.”

Mr. Breslin, however, was hardly depicted as a saint.

The defense lawyer Stephen G. Murphy recalled how Mr. Breslin talked to him loudly during the so-called Mafia cops trial, prompting a courthouse marshal to eject not Mr. Breslin, but Mr. Murphy. “I’ve been asked by many judges to leave, but never by what somebody else is doing,” Mr. Murphy quipped.

Les Payne, a Newsday columnist, evoked Mr. Breslin’s curmudgeonly personality. “He never seemed to think much of his editors, and of course, Jimmy doesn’t suffer fools gladly,” Mr. Payne said. “Some days he doesn’t care much for wise men either.”

Dan Barry, a national columnist for The Times, recalled that Mr. Breslin incessantly talked to him when Mr. Barry was visiting a hospital for a health procedure — practically to the point where Mr. Breslin was on the same gurney as Mr. Barry. “He had given me the gift of distraction,” Mr. Barry recalled. “He had filibustered away my fears. What’s more, he had reminded me of my responsibility to write. So I went back to the newsroom to write. That column? Forgettable. This story? Beautiful.”

Jim Dwyer, another Times columnist, who read from a dispatch Mr. Breslin filed from Lowndes County, Ala., said: “Jimmy Breslin is not about the clatter and the voice and the commotion of these funny stories, and this antic behavior you hear about. It’s not that. It’s really the stainless-steel truths that he was writing down in these very plain sentences from Alabama.”

When seemingly all that could be said was said, Mr. Breslin spoke, almost reticently.

“I don’t want to go back over my life,” he said. “I don’t want to start doing that, because it is boring, I think, No. 1, and No. 2, I’ll start lying to you.”

Mr. Breslin meandered a bit, appearing to predict, at one point, that the war in Afghanistan will seem “real” to most Americans only if the draft is reinstated. “And that’s when the tumult will start,” he predicted. (Later, he also reminisced about the 1948 presidential election, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.)

And Mr. Breslin only hinted at the malaise newspapers are facing, recalling that when he first tried to work for The Journal-American, a heavy-set Irish-American woman told him he couldn’t have a job there. “Looking back on it, she was trying to do me a hell of a favor, I guess,” he said.

Mr. Breslin, who says he has given up alcohol on the advice of doctors, added: “I’m not drinking. If I were drinking at the bar with you, I would tell a lot of lies and I would almost be charming.”

Jimmy Breslin’s run for City Council President with Norman Mailer running for Mayor, (in 1969) was one of the highlights of my political life! I remember bringing both of them to the Democratic Club in Queens that I was (junior) member of, and their rousing speeches. It was a great evening and one I will never forget!

I am so grateful for Mr. O’Neill’s observation that Breslin’s defining characteristic was an “intense hatred of unfairness” — something that the majority of today’s generation of highly-educated journalists seem so manifestly to lack. Except when it’s themselves who are being laid off.

If I could change one thing about journalism, it would be this. I don’t care whether you went to Harvard, Yale, or Queens Community College: first and foremost, we need you to cover and care about the people who won’t be heard if you don’t write about them.

I became a big fan of Jimmy Breslin way back in 1969 or 70. On my weekly rounds of art galleries, loaded down with a huge black portfolio, I wandered into Sardi’s. It was mid to late afternoon and only the upstairs bar was open. Sitting at the end of the bar was this guy, obviously a semi-regular, chatting with the bartender. As I eased into a seat at the far end of the bar, this guy looks over, smiled and asked what I had in the case. “Drawings,” I replied. “Just making the rounds.” “Hey, give this guy a drink on me. Anybody who creates stuff can’t be all bad.” That was my introduction to the “real” big city and a real New York artist.

I would like Sewell Chan to know that I appreciate his great reporting.

That’s a good point about Jimmy Breslin writing his columns based on reporting, not just opinions.

I remember a column Breslin wrote when Mayor Bloomberg refused to let 250,000 demonstrators against the war in Iraq hold a rally in Central Park after the Republican convention, because, he said, it would damage the grass.

Breslin spoke to the groundskeeper for the Shinnecock Golf Club, where the U.S. Open is played, who told him that they had 50,000 people a day for seven days two weeks ago, and their grass was back already. Central Park could take a rally of 250,000 people, and you’d never know they were there the next day.

There’s a good lesson here for the bloggers of today. One reason why Breslin made such an impact is because he got the facts.

Jimmy was and is one of the great commentators on the lives of ordinary people (and the not so ordinary). He, Pete Hamill, Murray Kempton, Mike McAlary, and a score of special observers and writers made NYC so alive to their readers.

Whether writing about lawyers, adulterous men and women at holiday times — who can ever forget the stories about the wife and mistress of this one guy having a confrontation on the Queensboro bridge one New Year’s Eve — or his famous talk about how schools failed our children because they could not figure out their left from their right and got all the signals for the drug dealers wrong, resulting in many busts — and our dopey politicians, and everything else Jimmy wrote about
and has yet to write about — all of it is gold.

And it was not without great personal angst and struggles –alcohol, personal health, the deaths of his beloved first wife and two daughters, but all the time Jimmy perservered and never lost his great wit or will.

Love Jimmy Breslin –he reminds me of my dad with those bushy Irish eyebrows of his. I found myself quoting him just last night to my kids, describing an inept bit of city government as ‘the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.’

A true New York original. I was introduced to Mr. Breslin’s work as an undergrad journalism student in the 1990’s and his type of writing was the reason I wanted to become a journalist. Unfortunately, I tried to enter the field when the hot thing was corporate journalism and I do not regret not having pursued the profession.

Journalism is about passion for the truth and giving a voice to those who have no voice. I appreciate what Jimmy Breslin gave to many of us readers through the years. I always recall his quote in a 60 Minutes interview about the “Disneyfication” of Times Square: “Gimme the hookers” in response to which he liked better: the old days, with the dealers and the hookers, or today, where Disney’s building a huge complex.

It would have been better working with Jimmy if he’d actually been nice to the clerks at the newspaper. They were at the bottom of the barrel in the very system he worked at, and he wasn’t nice to them at all.

Sometime in the 60’s Breslin was live on TV commenting on the suicide of an NY elected official who was under investigation for fraud.

Using the most colorful language imaginable to describe the deceased… “slimeball, crook, good riddanc etc” Jimmy was halted in mid flow by the widow of the deceased who joined the discussion live from a funeral parlor. Without missing a beat Breslin said “Sorry for your Troubles”!!

While at the BBC in the ’70s I worked briefly alongside Jimmy Breslin. He was generous, difficult, unreliable and a genius. Year later I was overjoyed to find his Newsday columns on the web. I was very sad when he hung up his typewriter.

At the wake for journalist Lars Erik-Nelson, I approached Mr. Breslin, whom I’ve been reading since the Son of Sam period, introduced myself and told him how much I admired his work since I was a kid. He said, “You trying to remind me of how old I am?” He then turned back to his companion and said, “How do you like this (expletive) guy?”

Thanks, anyway, Jimmy!

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